The Trail Is the Teacher is an episodic account of my somewhat unexpected 2016 thru hike of the 2,189-mile Appalachian Trail.

Prologue

Of the many the thru hiking accounts I’ve read, most open with either a) a scene of transcendent beauty/personal revelation or b) a moment of excruciating pain/extreme challenge. Think of the opening scene in the movie Wild, in which Reese Witherspoon, playing hiker Cheryl Strayed, hurls a bloody hiking boot into a deep gorge with a scream of rage.

But a month after completing my own, unconventional, somewhat unexpected Appalachian Trail thru hike, no singular moment of mysticism or misery has elbowed its way upstage. Instead, I keep coming back to a hiker I first met about 600 miles up the trail, in southern Virginia.

Lava Monster, Patches and Pony at the quarter-way mark, a day before meeting Two Pack.

The members of my unexpected crew — you’ll meet them later — and I were cooking dinner with other hikers at Jenkins Shelter (mile 578.6) when a petite young woman tottered up, burdened by an enormous pack. She was trailed by a grimacing older man, who made quick, angry work of pitching his tent, then disappeared inside without a word.

The girl set down her pack and started chattering nervously. Fine blond hair, cut short, framed her narrow face and her blue eyes were friendly, but fretful; there was something quavery and frail about her that reminded me of a baby bird that had fallen from the nest. I was surprised when she said she was 23 and a college graduate. Her companion, First Step, was a kind of chaperone, a former college professor she’d recruited because her parents wouldn’t let her hike the trail alone. Her trail name was Two Pack.

Over the next few hours, she talked almost nonstop, and I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time imagining how she had managed to survive nearly 600 miles of the trail. She seemed to know very little about camping or cooking. She lay the rain fly to her tent on muddy ground to “dry” as a light drizzle prickled down from a gray-cotton sky; a friendly husky staying at the shelter quickly circled several times and plopped down on the convenient ground cover for a rest.

And when she pulled her boots and socks off, she revealed narrow, pale, blister-ravaged feet whose toes seemed strangely stacked atop one another, almost crumpled.

With her companion awol in his tent, shelter denizens took pity on her, helping her cook and offering advice. I shooed away the dog and helped her hang her rain fly, and tried not to stare at her battered Picasso feet while handing her a thick roll of miracle-working Leukotape for that violent-looking crop of bloody blisters.

“I guess I’m being too negative,” Two Pack said, explaining First Step’s lack of sociability. “I’m not appreciating him enough. I should be more grateful.”

Though she usually pitched a tent, that night she nested securely among the many-colored lumps of a full shelter that night.

~~~

The next morning when I rose at 5:45 I saw through a misty gloom that First Step had already packed up and left camp, abandoning his charge. When she woke a short while later, she really was shaking a little bit. Was he gone for good? In classic, laconic hiker style, many of us offered words of encouragement.

“Well,” someone said, “now you can do what you wanted to do in the first place: Hike the AT on your own.”

A couple of hours up the trail, our crew passed a guilty-looking First Step, who wanted to know how Two Pack was doing. Cool, even a little remote — you don’t just bail on people like that — we all said she was fine; she was awake and gearing up to head out when we left. She would sink or swim now, on her own.

“I would bet a thousand bucks,” I said as we walked on, “there’s no way she’ll finish the trail.”

Nobody disagreed.

~~~

Four months later, I had become a southbounder — or rather, a flip-flopper, having jumped off in Vermont and gotten back on at Katahdin to finish my trek. I had just rock-hopped across the nearly dry Piscataquis River on a warm, late-August day, slipping at the last minute and soaking one shoe.

But I was feeling good, having just knocked out the first 90 miles of the 100-Mile Wilderness in four days. Now I was sitting on a rock, wringing out my sock, when a fast-moving woman in purple breezed by, grunted a hello, and picked her way quickly across the stones. She was soon followed by two companions, the first of whom I immediately recognized.

“No way! Two Pack!” I shouted, jumping up, genuinely feeling more elation than when I’d summited Katahdin just a few days before.

She looked me over and clearly didn’t recognize me. Her once doubtful blue eyes now seemed steely, almost grim with the same thousand-yard stare I’d seen on the faces of so many northbounders (aka NOBOs) who were plunging through the wilderness like hounds on a scent.

“My name’s Pony. We met somewhere in southern Virginia, way back in May,” I said, reaching out for a fist bump. “I gave you some Leukotape. Your companion bailed on you that morning….”

“Oh yeah,” she said slowly, a smile briefly softening her galvanized expression. “You were with some other guys, right? Younger guys? I remember you now.”

“I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings,” I said, “but we all thought there was no way you would ever finish. I’m super psyched to see you all the way up here! You definitely get my vote for most inspirational story on the AT this year.”

“Well … thanks,” Two Pack said. But her companion was hollering from across the creek and she was already moving up the trail. “I’ve had a lot of people tell me I’ve grown a lot on the AT.”

But I could see she didn’t need a compliment from me or anyone else. She had gotten up that chilly, foggy May morning in Virginia and, taking the advice of other hikers, just started walking. I learned later that her erstwhile chaperone bailed out in Pearisburg — and she kept going. Now, some 1,500 miles later, she’d be catching her first glimpses of Katahdin within a few days. One step at a time, sometimes on painful feet, she had walked right past all her doubters — her parents, her former professor, my crew — to prove that she was tough and resourceful and resilient.

Of course, she didn’t do it alone. Nobody does. Other hikers, yes. But most of all, she had the best teacher in the world: the trail.

Let’s face it. Most people would no more pick up a book about such enticing subjects as “ditches” and “water appropriation” than they’d spend an afternoon at the beach reading an auto manual in Esperanto.

But with his first book, “A Land Made of Water,” former water resources administrator for the city of Boulder’s open space program Robert R. Crifasi has written a deeply researched, deftly written guide that is both informative and entertaining, even for lay readers.

Widely regarded as one of the area’s bona fide water experts, Crifasi sat on the boards of 11 private Boulder ditch companies and managed all of the city’s ditches. He’s also shoveled countless tons of wet leaves, silt and the occasional dead skunk as a ditch rider.

He begins with a concise history of water development in the West, noting that the Anasazi people who inhabited Mesa Verde were building ditches and reservoirs for irrigation as early as 900 BCE. The Spanish took some of those ideas and blended them with a cultural and political system of “acequias,” a word adapted from the Arabic “al saqiya,” meaning “water conduit.”

The Boulder and St. Vrain valleys were dry indeed before pioneers dug the first ditch in 1859, using shovels and horse-drawn “Fresno scraper” plows. Based on historical documents and photos, he concludes, “I think we can safely state that east of the foothills from approximately Coal Creek on the south to St. Vrain on the north there were virtually no lakes present prior to active settlement.”

Few area residents may know that a famous 1882 Boulder County case, Coffin v. Left Hand Ditch Company, led to a Colorado Supreme Court decision that established the most basic (and still standing) principle of Western water law: first in time, first in right. Essentially, the ruling meant that simply owning land did not automatically give one rights to water passing through.

That may sound a little, well, dry. But Crifasi injects the history of this mini-water war with real-life drama, personalities and the occasional pointed observation.

“Today, Colorado’s Prior Appropriation system has become a symbol for the preference of private property over common property, the privatization of public resources, and the rule of markets to distribute natural resources,” he writes. But, he notes, the Left Hand Ditch Company resulted from the kind of cooperative that many would revile as “socialist” today, and prior appropriation was widely understood at the time as a victory against control of water by wealthy capitalists who could afford to buy land.

Crifasi relates the history of how modern Front Range residents came to enjoy a wealth of water through such public projects as the Moffat Tunnel and the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. He’s also refreshingly frank about conflicts between some environmentalists and the reality of water in the dry West.

While wearing his ditch rider’s hat, Crifasi ran into a young biologist who found found leopard frogs, a federal species of concern, in one of his ditches and thought it should not be disturbed.

“I wholeheartedly shared his desire to protect the species. But the problem was that these frogs migrated into and now occupy habitat that was created by people,” Crifasi writes. … Never mind that if someone like me didn’t get the laterals cleaned, there would be no point for the rancher to turn water into the laterals so he might irrigate his hay meadow. The laterals would simply dry out and cease providing tadpole habitat or a source of water for the hay meadow. … It felt like to me that he wanted … some kind of frog Valhalla. Our conversation made me feel like a callous frog killer for even suggesting it might be necessary to occasionally disturb the habitat … so that we might perpetuate it.”

He dispels, though history, the common romantic notion that “Indians roamed the plains as if it were an ecological utopia” and that settlement was “a fall from Eden that happened with the discovery of gold.”

“Human-induced changes to our streams and the outright construction of lakes make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between natural systems and those that are more or less derivative of human action,” he writes. And, he concludes, “Since Boulder citizens began actively acquiring open space in the name of preserving nature, I think it is especially important to consider how the landscapes … came into existence in the first place.”

Despite such candor, Crifasi isn’t likely to spend a weekend taking potshots at feds alongside the likes of Cliven Bundy; indeed, he has no truck with ranchers who refuse to see the value of preservation, as well. Rather, he is a deeply informed realist: “I do not wish to wax nostalgic for a paradise lost. Nor do I advocate dismantling our ditches and reservoirs or drying our fields to recreate something that is long gone.”

Good and wild: On the road with Abbey, Stegner and David Gessner

Sometimes it’s easy for a Westerner to forget just how forgettable most of America, especially the East Coast, thinks we are.

I had a college roommate in New York who, truly vexed, once asked, “What is Nebraska? I can’t eve conceive of it.”

On the second page of former Boulder resident David Gessner’s richly informative and entertaining new book, “All the Wild That Remains,” he runs into something similar regarding the subjects of the book.

“When I mentioned the names of these two writers in the East, I sometimes got befuddled looks. More than once I had been asked: ‘Wallace Stevens? Edward Albee?’ No, I would patiently explain. Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey,” he writes.

And you know what? Young Westerners are only slightly more likely to know of Stegner and Abbey, and even fewer have read them.

So here’s hoping that a slew of glowing reviews in Eastern media will inspire more than a few people to read this book, where they will learn not just about these two gods of the Western writing pantheon, but also to the critical issues that they, and Gessner, want us all to be thinking about — climate change, scarcity, water, environmental destruction, overpopulation, and the awe-inspiring beauty of our sere landscapes.

David Gessner. davidgessner.com

Gessner, whose 1999 memoir, “Under the Devil’s Thumb,” explored his time in Boulder and recovering from testicular cancer, has since written some bona fide latter-day classics, including “The Tarball Chronicles,” about the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and “Return of the Osprey.”

His new book is a dual biography of the two equally important, yet utterly different, men. It’s also a memoir of Gessner’s quest to know them better, and an important examination of some of the biggest challenges facing the West.

It’s also an incredibly enjoyable read. You’ll feel like a co-conspirator on a great road trip through the West with not two, but three, great nature writers, sitting in the back seat, reveling in their stories.

Stegner, raised on the windy plains of Saskatchewan and in Mormon country, is the author of the brilliant John Wesley Powell biography, “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” and many other works of fiction and non-fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “Angle of Repose.” He became a sage of Stanford, starting the university’s creative writing program and teaching such luminaries as Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Nancy Parker and, yes, Edward Abbey.

Stegner also became active in preserving the West. He accepted Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s invitation to edit a book of essays on the natural marvels of Dinosaur National Monument in Western Colorado, thereby preventing a dam project, and his famous “Wilderness Letter” helped win passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Abbey was an irascible Easterner who came West and first made his mark with, “Desert Solitaire,” a memoir of his months working as a ranger in (then) remote and scarcely visited Arches National Monument, the closest thing to “Walden” ever written about the West. His other famous work is “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” the popular novel about a group of environmentalists who take direct action against the ruination of their beloved West, and the source of the term “monkeywrenching.”

Tough, crude and uncompromising, Abbey loved guns, preached anarchy (“democracy taken seriously”), and chucked beer cans out the window because, he said, the real ugliness was the highway peeling away beneath his wheels. He inspired both Earth First! and countless thousands of young people who left the comfortable lives to come experience the true West.

Abbey hated and mourned the destruction caused by the construction of the West’s most famous dams, especially the one that obliterated Glen Canyon.

“He had known this place and loved it, and after its drowning he would write about it in fiction and nonfiction, both mourning the canyon in elegiac prose and ranting against the dam in full tirade,” Gessner writes. “Lake Powell, he contended, was not a lake at all but a fetid bathtub constructed … for the money procured by the electricity it produced. … Recreation … consisted of Jet Skiing and powerboating around a tub of water where biodiversity was all but nonexistent.”

Abbey was all about afflicting the comfortable: “Never before in history have slaves been so well fed, thoroughly medicated, lavishly entertained,” he wrote of Americans, “but we are nevertheless slaves.”

Yet another brilliant Western writer, Terry Tempest Williams, provocatively told Gessner that, “In so many ways Ed was the conservative, and Wally forever the radical.” An odd thing to say about the former, who advocated free love and anarchy, and the latter, who married for life and enjoyed a stellar academic career.

Gessner can’t quite see Abbey as a conservative, but does embrace Stegner as a kind of radical: “Having witnessed the failure of a thousand rugged individualists, his father among them, as they battled the inhospitable landscape, he came to believe in community. Having grown up in movement, he came to value staying put.”

The book is a great introduction to both writers, and will no doubt send many readers to their works. It offers the added pleasure of Gessner’s journeys through the West, sometimes with his young daughter, his musings on climate change, dams, and range management issues, and visits such luminaries as Douglas Peacock, Wendell Berry and Stegner’s son.

“Walk alone in the desert for ten days or go live on a barrier island for a while or even camp in the backcountry with bears,” Gessner urges. “Not because you are going to film it or make a YouTube video about it but because of the experience itself.”

Don’t be comfortable. Forget getting rich and famous. Look to men like Stegner and Abbey, he concludes, who point to “creative possibilities for living a life both good and wild.”

If Gessner isn’t careful, one of these days he might just find himself in the same pantheon as Stegner, Abbey, Barry Lopez, Berry, Williams and our other invaluable chroniclers and seers of the West.

Since finishing my first thru hike last summer (Colorado Trail, July 2-26), I’ve voraciously read and listened to just about any account of thru hiking I can find.

downthetrail.com

In truth, most of the published thru hiking books are worth three or fewer stars, basically charming, sincere and mostly fun, yet rather artless, hiker journals. Ironically, the best of them seem to be by people who don’t bother finishing their trails — Bill Bryson’s Into the Woods, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and I Promise Not to Suffer by Gail Storey are three good ones. In other words, the author-first, hiker-second formula results in better books.

One of the better books in the next strata down is A Long Way from Nowhere: A Couple’s Journey on the Continental Trail Divide by Matt and Julie Urbanski, a detailed account of a difficult trail that goes beyond the day-to-day tramping.

I also want to plug a podcast I recently discovered, Sounds of the Trail, put together by a hiker who goes by her trail name, Gizmo. So far, listening to the podcast is as close as I’ve come to soothing a heart that still aches from being off the trail.

But I’ve noticed a common thread in a lot of these accounts: Excessive fear of animals, both wildlife and livestock.

Others have written extensively about the extreme unlikelihood of being injured by a large, “scary” animal on the trail — bear, mountain lion, moose. Suffice it to say that while caution is warranted, particularly in areas where wildlife has become habituated to humans, actual attacks on hikers are vanishingly rare.

But I want to talk about what seems to be an area of terror for many hikers: cows. Or rather, as ranch people say — I’m a former cowboy — cattle, since “cows” are only mature females; mature, intact males are bulls; mature, neutered males are steers; young but sexually mature females are heifers; and all the babies are calves.

One day on the trail as I approached Princeton Hot Springs, I turned a switchback to find a teenage girl standing hesitantly mid-trail, all alone. I said hi and she said her father was down in the next draw, photographing a moose. “I’m scared, so I stayed here.” I hustled down, hoping to see the moose and was bemused to discover instead about 15 cow-calf pairs, mamas and babies, rummaging and snorting and shitting around in the riparian greenery.

The photographer seemed flustered about how to get himself out of the midst of what are, admittedly, very large animals. So I started “cowboying afoot,” getting around behind the little herd and gently, quietly working them onto the trail. Then, again, very calmly, I gradually walked around their flank, and they responded precisely as 99% of cattle will, moving away from me, back into the trees. I was through them in a minute and kept walking.

Cows are big, up to 1,000 pounds. Cows can kill. In fact, cows kill more people in the U.S. every year than bears, by far. But they are nothing to be afraid of in almost all circumstances. So, some things to know before your next hike through cow territory:

They are skittish and, like most bears, want nothing to do with you.

You can turn them or spook them with a yell or by waving your arms, but….

Don’t do that. There is no need to upset them. Instead,

Remember that cows want to move away from you at all times. Whichever direction you want them to go, get on the opposite side of the cattle.

Be calm. Gentle motions and sounds will keep them moving. All the “yeehaw” bullshit you’ve seen in Western movies? That will get you fired on most ranches.

In fact, you can walk right through the middle of them, if you wish; they’ll part like the Red Sea. But go slowly, so they don’t panic and bump one another into you.

They are extremely unlikely to attack you except in one situation: If there is a very small (i.e. just born) calf in the vicinity, stay away from that mama cow. She may be stressed already from giving birth, and she will protect the baby by charging you (as I know all too well; I once had to pull a calf’s afterbirth off so it could breath, and mama did not like that at all … she ran right over me; it hurt).

Once babies are up and moving around, they learn from mama to be afraid of you, so they will keep their distance.

Bulls are usually lazy, and want no more to do with you than other cattle. But if they start fighting each other, get as far away from them as you can. Once the ol’ testosterone kicks in, they see nothing and I’ve seen them literally knock a horse and rider to the ground, blindly charging.

A couple more quick cow facts for the curious:

Those red-and-white cows are Herefords and the black ones are Angus, the two most common cattle breeds you’re likely to see on the trail. Angus-Hereford crosses range from all black to black and white to red and white to all red.

You may see white cattle or off-white. They are either purebred or crossbred Charolais cattle.

The cattle most people think of, the tallish, white-with-black-spots variety, are Holsteins, a dairy breed you aren’t likely to see on the trail (in the West; perhaps on the AT it’s different).

There is no such thing as a “factory farmed” beef animal. They are all raised outside on pasture. Most are sent to a “feedlot” at the end of their lives, but even there, they are in large pens outside. I’m not defending any of this, just educating.

Dairy calves raised as “veal,” however, are raised in terrible confinement.

I’m still thinking about the trail throughout the day. When I asked my friend Sparkle, who completed the trail with her dog Jude in 2014 and was my original inspiration to walk the Colorado Trail, when this would stop, she just laughed.

“I still think of it pretty much every day,” she said.

I’ve bought some books about other long trails, the Appalachian, Continental Divide and Pacific Crest trails, specifically, and I hope to at least be able to do some sections next year. Maybe part of the AT in spring, then do all the CDT in Colorado that I haven’t done yet. We’ll see.

In the meantime, some thoughts:

New gear is great. But I was bemused to learn that sometimesold standbys remained my best bet, especially my 25-year-old North Face base layer shirt, which has held up better than any new base layer I’ve bought since, and my trusty 10-year-old lightweight Columbia pants with zip-off legs. (Of course, someone at North Face must have figured out years ago that they make less money when they make highly durable goods, so none of the shirts I’ve bought in the intervening years lasted more than a couple of years, max. Bummer.)

Essential “non-essential” gear. I had a snotty attitude about certain pieces of gear before setting out, particularly trekking poles, which I was pretty sure I’d only ever seen being used by suburban hausfraus out for a three-mile day hike wearing too much perfume. But on Sparkle’s insistence, I borrowed a pair of Leki poles (from a former suburban hausfrau, as it turns out: me mum, though thankfully she’s not a perfumer) and I would never, ever thru-hike without them again.

gaiters

Poles allowed me to use my upper body to a small degree when climbing and eased the impact of going downhill and stepping off rocks. I was also pretty sure that I’d toss my battered 12-year-old Mountain Hardwear rock gaiters — extra weight, you know — but I consider gaiters indispensable on the trail. Every time I saw a hiker parked by the side of the trail unlacing his or her shoes to dump out a rock or stick, I was grateful.

Durango was depressing because all the sudden I was dumped off the trail into this city with no obvious gathering place for hikers (like, say, the Raven’s Rest in Lake City). I didn’t know about the tradition of a free beer at Carver Brewing Co., but even that wouldn’t have lasted long enough for me.

Shortly before going on the trail, I read David Gessner’s excellent book, All the Wild That Remains, a mashup of bios about Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner and Gessner’s own thoughts about the natural world of the West (read my review here). I love this advice from the book: “Walk alone in the desert for ten days or go live on a barrier island for a while or even camp in the backcountry with bears. Not because you are going to film it or make a YouTube video about it but because of the experience itself.” When my iPhone drowned in a deluge on Segment 21, I actually became even more in tune with the trail. In addition, while part of me desperately wishes it could simply push “play” and run the whole adventure like a movie in my mind, I think much of the poetry of the experience is that it is ephemeral. The trail is a lesson in non-attachment, before, during, and after.

Some product endorsements:

I will say again that wearing Hoka One One shoes on the trail was perfect for me. I foolishly started with a pair that already had 400+ miles on them, but switched them out at Breckenridge. Early generations of these shoes fell apart way too quickly, but after nearly 400 miles from Breck-Durango, mine had suffered some minor external tearing on the uppers, and that’s it. Padding … ahhhhhh…..

While buying the new pair of Hokas at Vertical Runner in Breck, the young woman who helped me recommended Swiftwick socks. I’ve always thought socks are pretty much socks, though some wear out faster than others. I’m here to say that Swiftwick socks are amazing. They are durable, lightweight, and they wick better than any socks I’ve ever run or hiked in.

Product endorsements over. I did not receive any compensation for these plugs.

Almost everyone I met on the trail was happy to be there, even knowing that adversity and discomfort was part of the experience. I learned not to dwell on what was going wrong (blisters, weird swelling, rain, didn’t pack enough food, etc.) but also to allow myself to feel cranky, knowing it would all pass. I never met “Carl,” the gloomy Eeyore guy on the CT 2015 Thru-hike Facebook page, but damn, why bother hiking if all you can do is complain? And then there was the man I thought of as “Gun Guy,” who burst onto the FB

The freedom of filth.

page to let everybody know not to be afraid of the pistol he would be packin’. I didn’t meet him, but I met others who did, and basically, he did the same thing on the trail, barging into camp waving his gun around (although now he was claiming that “my wife made me bring it along, for bears” — maybe he got the hint that nobody was impressed?) To me, if you start down the trail in an attitude of fear, you probably aren’t going to have much fun.I loved being out of touch, not knowing what was going on in the world. And I learned that I really am a loner — except when I’m not. I loved meeting hikers in town, and threemonths later, I feel bereft of that community. I also quite literally find myself skipping showers for a couple of days in a feeble effort to recreate something, anything, from the trail. But itchy scalps and blackened fingernails don’t do the trick.

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Clay Bonnyman Evans is a freelance writer who lives in South Carolina and Colorado. In his career as a journalist, he wrote for such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register and Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.)
His book, "Bones of My Grandfather," will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in July 2018. It is the story of his grandfather, First Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., who was killed in the battle of Tarawa on Nov. 22, 1943 and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Since 2010, Evans has been involved with efforts to recover Marine remains from Tarawa with nonprofit History Flight, Inc. He was present in May 2015 for the discovery and exhumation of his grandfather, who was reinterred in Knoxville, Tennessee in September 2015.
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